Never Gutless

Saturday, August 28, 2010

A History of the world

The campaign world which I am currently constructing, is currently an unfinished and very wrought setting, but I have begun mapping out some of the basic topography as well as history of the place. Here is a little bit of that information.

This world, the Broken Lands, is divided into a series of large island size continents of various shapes and sizes. The biggest of these is very long and wide, but is shaped somewhat like an hourglass. In the ancient past, in the center of that hourglass lay a great and fantastic mountain range which was home to the center of civilization in the material realm - a great dwarf kingdom. This kingdom was totally unrivaled in every respect - they had mastered the greatest magics, had extremely powerful mental prowess, and even had achieved a fantastic connection to the gods - but their power was meaningless in the tragedy that was to come, some have even rumored that their power was the reason for their downfall.

When the meteor crashed from the far realm, It fell directly into the center of this hourglass shaped continent and leveled the entire mountain range. It wiped out the entirety of the great dwarf civilization and shattered their mountains and their mountain castles. These mountains were crushed and plunged into the ocean, only the very tips of these mountains were left standing above the waters that plunged into absorb them. Now this central area of the continent is a great archipelago of mountain peeks which jut out of the water.

Many ages have passed since the meteor that crashed into the world and brought forth The Weird. Things are much different now. The dwarf kingdoms are all gone and the last of the dwarves are now scattered across the world. Some still cling to their noble lineage, living in hiding from the rest of the material world which despises them, but most dwarves have found themselves as nomadic bandits and scavengers, making a rough living through theft, larceny, and mercenary ways.

However, the dwarves were not the only thing affected by the Meteor, quite the opposite in fact. The aberrant forces which the meteor brought with it have been slumbering and growing more powerful - some times they awake and wreak havoc on the world. The people of the material world now lie in wait for the greatest of them to all awake and leave the world in ruin. Due to this threat, the world is massing its forces, but they have not relegated their arms to strictly this purpose.

The world is at war.

The entire material plane is making a great war across the continents. Each nation has its own goal, but the war that has been raging for several hundred years now and shows no signs of ending; this is a war that has not gone on peacefully, but it is also not a war that everyone in the world is aware of. The power level of this war is beyond what most common people could fathom. It has even gone as far as to involve the gods, directly on the battlefield, but more than anything, this war has been one of technological evolution and information. Each state has been mobilizing its magisters, artisans, engineers, and its technomagicians in order to build up armies that can conquer it all.

This is not to say that actual wars are a thing of the past, but these sets of skirmishes and battles are nothing compared to the big picture struggle that is going on.